Extra informatie
‘Based on a string of four quotations from Samuel Beckett’s Watt (written in 1942-1944, published in 1953), fo(u)r watt is a work that demonstrates the formal and imaginative power of a type of visual narrative in print that does not need the alibi of a precomposed scenario to display a wide range of stories, characters, and places – the three inevitably intertwined aspects or dimensions of any narrative whatsoever. The sequential arrangement of the drawings in this book follows the fundamental structure of the diptych as suggested by its first images: the whole string of drawings unfolds between the four quotations by Beckett, which one finds in the beginning (1 sentence), in the middle (2 sentences, each of them on of the pages of the central double spread) and in the end (1 sentence), the covers of the book being deprived of visual images (they just contain “printed matter, which rapidly morphs into a visual sign as well, given the mirror effect between front and back cover: a chronology is thus established by purely formal means, but this chronology is not unilinear, since one is encouraged to read from A to Z and then back again from Z to A).’ Jan Baetens
Van Sébastien Conard verscheen eerder bij het balanseer het tweeluik Hoe was de toekomst vandaag? / Degré Zéro (2016) en onder het pseudoniem Neitsabes Dranoc de beeldfabel Lamaree. In 2019 verscheen zijn persoonlijke versie van Tijl Uilenspiegel.
- ‘Abstract Narratives, and No End’, Jan Baetens (Culturalstudiesleuven, 27/11/2019)